Murder to Go by Emma Lathen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"To-oo Make Life Bright
Have Chi-i-cken To-oo-nite!"

Murder to Go (1969) is my first novel by Emma Lathen, a pseudonym of a mystery-writing duo of economists, Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart. Alas, it is not a particularly auspicious introduction to the authors. I may try to read another book of theirs, but my interest has substantially decreased. Wikipedia tells us that all mysteries by Emma Lathen are situated in the world of business and that each novel deals with a different type of industry. While indeed the complicated business/finance/economics matters are presented in a way accessible to a layman reader like myself, I tend to be less interested in business activities than in watching gray paint dry on a gray wall.

John Putnam Thatcher is a senior vice-president of Sloan Guaranty Trust, "the third-largest bank in the world". The bank happens to be financing the Chicken Tonight company, a chicken dinner home delivery franchising operation that has been booming under the leadership of Frank Hedstrom. Mr. Hedstrom "built up a million-dollar business - almost overnight": he is a "boy wonder" in the business world and he is planning to expand into other areas by taking over an insurance company.

But then 72 people in six states are hospitalized with acute food poisoning and the health authorities quickly establish that Chicken Tonight is to blame. The seemingly accidental poisoning was in fact the result of tampering with the food ready be delivered. One of the victims dies so that the police and other government agencies now have to deal with murder. The authorities suspect a disgruntled employee. However, it is actually Mr. Thatcher who solves the case and uncovers business machinations that underlie the tampering.

We learn a lot about various aspects of franchising business and gain insights into the basics of finance:

"When trouble befalls a debtor, there is a period when he covers up, when he minimizes his predicament, [... when] he is the one who does the worrying. But let things go really sour and positions get reversed. The creditor does the worrying, and the debtor holds the whip hand."

The novel also provides slight comedy relief: one of the threads describes preparations to celebrate work anniversary of a high-ranking employee of the bank. The preparations are so elaborate that they virtually bring all other activities of the third-largest bank in the world to a standstill.

This competently written and somewhat engaging mystery might be quite interesting for readers interested in business intrigues. Certainly not for me.

Two stars.


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Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman by Sam Wasson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"She's a phony. But she's a real phony."
(O.J. Berman, Holly Golightly's agent in Breakfast at Tiffany's.)

Funny how one (mis)remembers things. I vividly remember the place where I read Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's in summer of 1965, but I only vaguely remember the book. On the other hand, I do not remember, even roughly, when I watched the movie based on the book, but I vividly remember Audrey Hepburn in her iconic black dress and her long cigarette holder. Sam Wasson's Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (2010) is an detailed story of making of that movie, and the title refers to the exact time and place when the shooting began on October 2, 1960. The book was awarded the honor of New York Times' Best Book of the Year so I am happy that I like it a lot too.

The reader will be impressed by the completeness of the author's study. In addition to obvious aspects like Capote's story on which the movie story is based, Audrey Hepburn's performance, and Blake Edward's direction, Mr. Wasson discusses a variety of other factors: Edith Head's costumes, Givenchy dresses, Mel Ferrer's (Ms. Hepburn's husband) meddling, Henry Mancini's music, the "Moon River" song, and many others.

Two aspects of the study appeal the most to me. The author succeeds in explaining one of the sources of the movie's success: the change in social norms and attitudes regarding depiction of women in movies that was happening between the late 1950s and the early 1960s. The author also stresses the movie's role in furthering that change in social norms. Before 1960s the women in films were portrayed either as "saints" or "sluts." Breakfast breaks with this stereotype: its heroine, Holly Golightly, is basically an expensive call girl, presented as a kooky plaything, sweet and very likeable:

"It was one of the earliest pictures to ask us to be sympathetic towards a slightly immoral young woman. Movies were beginning to say that if you were imperfect, you didn't have to be punished."

The other aspect I find very interesting is the author's clear understanding that making Hollywood movies is not about art, not about entertainment, and - of course - not about changing social mores and climate. It is ONLY about business, ONLY about making money. The actor's skill, the screenplay, the director's talent are just tools to make money for the producers:

"... the crude reality of supply and demand contends that great talent, no matter how awesome, must be a salable commodity marketable to its era..."

Creating a new star, creating a new look for women are a business. Even the famous Little Black Dress worn by Holly had to be appropriately "packaged" for ensuring maximum business.

The reader will find many other fascinating observations and analyses: for instance, I love the fragments about how movie censorship worked in 1960 - from today's point of view the practices seem totally insane. Passages about the French author, Colette, noticing Audrey Hepburn and about the Givenchy's dresses are fascinating. And of course the never boring persona of Truman Capote is towering in the background. If not for the overly florid language, painfully pretentious chapter titles, and abundance of gossip tabloid stuff, this could be a truly great book.

Three and a half stars.

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Helvetesilden by Karin Fossum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"It was always the small things, the links between people and where they could lead."

Another great book from Karin Fossum, one of my most favorite mystery writers. So far I have reviewed nine of her books on Goodreads, and rated two of them ( Black Seconds and The Murder of Harriet Krohn ) with five stars, a very rare rating for this very picky and fussy reader. Of hundreds of authors in the crime/mystery genre that I have read in over 50 years, Ms. Fossum joins only Nicolas Freeling and Denise Mina in the select trio of mystery writers for whom I feel a deep, total, and virtually uncritical admiration. They just seem never to have written anything that I wouldn't at least like a lot. (After the rating I am trying to explain the reasons why I love Ms. Fossum's books so much.)

As far as I know Hell Fire (2014) is the newest work by Ms. Fossum to appear in English translation. Inspector Sejer is on the scene of a brutal murder of a young woman and her five-year-old son. The story shifts to half a year earlier and we meet a single mother, Mass, living with her adult son, Eddie, who has not quite adapted to societal norms and is unable to hold a job. We follow the two parallel and interleaving threads: one of Bonnie and Simon, the future victims, and the other of Mass and Eddie.

Of course we know almost right away who committed the crime, but the mystery lies in the reasons and motives. Many readers will not be disappointed in the denouement, which is one of the most unexpected for Ms. Fossum. I prefer her usual unsurprising ones.

Bonnie is employed as a home health aide; to me the best thing in the novel is the portrayal of her work with the elderly and handicapped. The scene of cleaning Erna's house, after first dressing the table legs in multiple pairs of socks, is unforgettable. Erna, one of the background characters, is painted so vividly that I could swear I know her. Also, the novel is desperately sad. It shows, without being overtly didactic, the social consequences of broken families and unwanted children.

Translation is far from stellar. Not being a native speaker of English I have been able to spot numerous awkward phrases. I have doubts about several words: for instance, the alcohol that characters drink in the novel is likely the Scandinavian specialty, akvavit, for some reason translated as eau de vie. Sure, it means the same thing, but they drink akvavit in Norway, not eau de vie.

Hell Fire is certainly not a five-star book. While I loved reading it - I will probably never not love anything written by the author - there is not much in it that wouldn't feel as just another instance of a standard template of a Fossum's novel. It sort of reads as the author's manifesto "all my novels are like this."

Four stars.


(I revere Ms. Fossum's novels for four reasons. First, she is not much interested in the whodunit aspect of the story. People and their motivations are her main focus. This is precisely what interests me: I want to know why rather than trying to figure out who did it. Second, and perhaps most important: Ms. Fossum is never judgmental: even the brutal murderers of children are portrayed in her novels as human beings. It would be so easy to condemn the evil beasts that they are, but instead she tries to comprehend what made them commit the acts of brutality. To grossly oversimplify, I don't think she believes people are born evil.

The two other reasons for my adoration of Ms. Fossum's work are related to her writing. Other than the crime that sets up the plot, nothing much seems to happen in her stories. We do not have any "twists or turns"; we read about ordinary, everyday events, and ordinary life. Inspectors Sejer and Skarre thoroughly and patiently do their work, and Sejer then conducts his slow questioning of the accused. Finally, I love Ms. Fossum's quiet, understated writing style: no big words, no flourish, no hyperbole. Just the "small things.")

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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?"

An important book, particularly for people of my generation, people for whom death is no longer a quasi-fictional event that only happens to other people. The Year of Magical Thinking (2006) is a non-fiction book in that it describes actual events that happened to actual people. It focuses on two main topics: the psychology of grief after death of one's closest person and the rituals of magical thinking in which people indulge after the death shatters and disintegrates their world.

For 39 years Ms. Didion had been married to John Dunne, the well-known poet. Indeed, he had had heart troubles earlier in his life and had undergone several procedures, but recently everything has been fine with his health. And suddenly, over dinner, he dies of a massive coronary. The phrase:

"How could this have happened when everything was normal."

becomes a sort of leitmotif of the entire book which describes Ms. Didion's thoughts and behaviors during the year that followed. The major trauma of the lifelong partner's death is compounded by a serious, continually life-threatening illness of her adopted daughter Quintana Roo, who has to be hospitalized during the author's mourning.

One of the main points the author is making is that we are unable to know what grief is until it hits us personally. When it does it becomes a catastrophe that we are completely unable to imagine and is in no way similar to the simplistic depictions shown on TV and in the movies. Grief overwhelms us and debilitates us; it is more powerful than anything we can summon against it:

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. [...] We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind."

Ironically, the copy of the book that I read had a stamp of "Self Help" genre: Ms. Didion clearly tells us that there is no help for grief, no 'healing' is possible, and that no one can ever learn how to mourn.

Probably the most fascinating passages in the book are those where the author recounts numerous episodes of magical thinking during her year of mourning. The term 'magical thinking' refers to people's belief that events may happen that are not subject to the usual, scientific rules of causation. For instance, we think that 'if only we did this and that, the unavoidable event would not have happened.' Ms. Didion hauntingly recounts the moments she thought she was guilty of her husband's death because she "had allowed other people to think he was dead." She writes the following about her thought half a year after her husband's death:

"'Bringing him back' had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. 'Seeing it clearly' did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need."

The reader will find so many more important topics in Ms. Didion's compelling work; for instance she writes about changing attitudes to death or the sickening tendency to use euphemisms instead of dealing with painful reality. However the most important message of the book is simply that death is final, and we humans are just not built for that.

Four stars.

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Dirty Blonde by Lisa Scottoline
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'Against the door,' Cate heard herself say.
'Whatever,' he murmured , easing her back against the door in the dark hallway. She was on fire, and his hands grabbed at her skirt, pushing it up. He moaned when he felt bare skin."

In my previous life of a reader interested only in mystery and crime novels I had read several legal thrillers by Lisa Scottoline, in the Rosato & DiNunzio series. Fortunately, Dirty Blonde (2006), the book that I selected to refresh my acquaintance with the author, is a standalone novel. Unfortunately, even if I am marginally recommending it, I do not like the novel much. The clever setup and the first 80 or so pages are the best things about the book.

We meet judge Cate Fante as she is attending a party celebrating her appointment to the district court. When the party is over Judge Fante drives to a bar, meets a guy, and lets him touch her intimately. We soon learn that in her free time Judge Cate solicits casual sex in seedy bars. The double entendre of the title works really well! Ms. Fante is a highly qualified and conscientious judge, who cares not only about the law but also about so-called justice (Ms. Scottoline knows pretty well that these two often have very little in common). She also helps her best friend raise an autistic son to whom she is a godmother.

Judge Fante begins her district court career by presiding over a trial where the plaintiff, a lawyer named Marz, sues a Hollywood producer for stealing his idea of a very successful TV show. Judge Fante's verdict follows the law but not her idea of justice. The outcome of the trial sets up one thread of the plot: the producer is soon killed and Mr. Marz apparently commits suicide. Another thread is preposterous: Judge Fante learns that a TV series is in preparation based on her work as a judge and detailing her sexual escapades. At that point the novel loses any semblance of plausibility and devolves into a TV-show-like silliness, with ridiculous twists and turns.

We have to endure inanities like Cate's playing a detective, good cops arresting good cops, FBI involvement, shenanigans in the court building, etc. Many pages in the later part of the book are just pure space filler that does not serve any purpose in characterization or advancement of the plot. Probably the publisher has an acceptable range of the number of pages and Ms. Scottoline was a bit short. We also have a syrupy happy ending, quite implausible considering the plot.

Other than the beginning and the setup I like the well-written and touching passage when Judge Fante visits her mother's grave and the rather incongruous but interesting reference to Centralia, a coal-mining town in north-eastern Pennsylvania. Stories about the horrendous underground mine fire and the plight of the anthracite coal miners suffering from the black lung disease are moving but all that is not enough to like the novel much.

Two and a half stars.


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Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] it seemed to Vernon that he was infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of all people who had listened to him, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all."

I finished reading Ian McEwan's Amsterdam (1998) - my first novel of this quite famous author - only few days ago but have been too busy since then to write a review. Alas, I am finding out that I have already forgotten much about the novel and need to reach to my notes to refresh memory. It does not seem like an auspicious introduction to the author.

The novel begins with a formidable sentence:

"Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel with their backs to the February chill."

Molly, a well-known restaurant critic and photographer, has died rather suddenly of a rapidly progressing brain disease. Her funeral ceremony is in progress: Clive, a famous composer, and Vernon, the editor of Judge, a popular London tabloid, reminisce about their times and sex they had with Molly. Another Molly's former lover, Julian, who is currently the foreign secretary and has his sights set on the position of Prime Minister, is also a subject of the conversation. Molly's husband, George, completes the quintet of the main characters in the novel.

After the interesting opening - the conversation in the crematorium is quite a nice piece of real literature - the novel morphs into a sort of mystery. George finds compromising photographs from Molly's past, and all three former lovers become involved in the plot that focuses on whether to publish the pictures in Vernon's magazine. Unfortunately, I could not care less for the plot: it is of as sensationalist quality as the stories in Judge that Mr. McEwan is ridiculing.

On the other hand, there is some good stuff in the novel as well. For instance, I appreciate the author's sense of humor: Clive has been commissioned to compose the Millennial Symphony to be performed at the dawn of 2001, the task he envisions as something on the order of Beethoven's Ninth. When he finishes the work by composing a sort of current-day Ode to the Joy, the Ninth final movement, he contemplates whether he is a genius - a hilarious fragment of prose.

Obviously, the best passages in the novel have nothing to do with the plot. In addition to the outstanding beginning, the account of Vernon's hectic day as an editor of Judge and the description of the workplace politics are first rate. Yet perhaps the best fragment of the novel shows how Clive composes the key musical motif for the final movement of his masterpiece: while hiking near Allen Crags in the Lake District he hears a bird's piping sound on three notes. That sound becomes the inspiration for his monumental work but prevents him from paying attention to more important things that are happening at the same time. Realistic, well written, and funny! The ending is probably supposed to be funny as well, but I find the comedic payoff somewhat feeble.

Amsterdam is an easy read (maybe a warning sign?) and one can find quite a few thoughtful quotes in the text. While Mr. McEwan is certainly a gifted writer and his accomplished prose is a pleasure to read I do not think that the highly polished sentences add up to much.

Two and three quarter stars.

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On the Line by S.J. Rozan
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"Focus! Christ, Smith, focus"

What an extreme disappointment! This is my tenth novel by S.J. Rozan, the author of remarkably good Winter and Night and Stone Quarry , an author whom until now I would have trusted not to be able to produce bad novels. Even the weaker installments in the series, for instance, Mandarin Plaid, were at a decent level. Alas On the Line (2010) is a completely different story. Juvenile, utterly implausible, and brimming with clichés worthy of the greatest Masters of Formulaic Thrillers.

Bill Smith is practicing Brahms piano sonata when his phone rings: Lydia Chin manages to say a few words but then the kidnapper interrupts. An electronically altered voice tells Mr. Smith that he has 12 hours to find Lydia. Otherwise she dies. The kidnapper, once wronged by Smith, is now exacting his revenge. Our hero is invited to a game: he will be offered a series of clues and if he does not solve even one of the puzzles, Lydia will be killed. Yeah, as lame as that. If you are new to the series: Lydia is Bill's detection business partner, and also his unrequited (as far as we know) love. Please read better books by S.J. Rozan than this one. This mess is not worth your time.

Mr. Smith enlists the help of Linus, Lydia's "kid cousin", a teenager computer whiz, and his girlfriend, Trella, who is "barely old to drink". Linus and Trella are accompanied by a canine superhero named Woof. So Smith, Linus, Trella, and Woof are the crew to battle the Super Evil Villain in the series of puzzles. Later in the story they are joined by a "piece-of-work pimp and his boys." I am not sure even Mr. Patterson would stoop so low with the plot.

And now combine the canine-enhanced juvenile crew with murders of Chinese prostitutes, the murders being parts in the puzzles set by the Super-Evil Villain. Combine the human drama of torture and death with the (maybe unintended) humor inherent in the composition of the good guys' team. The combination is putrid.

The clues left by the ArchVillain are usually booby-trapped. When the dramaturgy of the story requires explosion, BAM! There it is. Obviously Mr. Smith knows what the booby traps are. So lame! The puzzles are based on loose associations related to popular culture. Of course, Smith and the crew are instantaneously able to decrypt all the references. It reminds me of the most atrocious cliché of the last 50 years of thrillers. Suppose a computer geek needs to get into a passworded computer system: the genius sits at the keyboard, thinks for seven seconds, makes a guess, and the guess is right!

I would like to say: FOCUS!, S.J. ROZAN, FOCUS!!!

One and a half stars.

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The Life of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Unlike James, Joyce, or Conrad, who were all in exile from worlds they detested, Chandler was in exile from a world he thought he loved. Instead of his adored England, he lived in a place where values seemed to shift with the tides."

Seven weeks ago I reviewed here the biography of Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar). Since Macdonald has often been compared to Raymond Chandler it seems worthwhile to compare their biographies. I do not find Frank MacShane's The Life of Raymond Chandler equally brilliant work, but it is a solid, informative, and interesting book, and I recommend it without any hesitation. I also need to provide a disclaimer of sorts: I consider Ross Macdonald to be a better writer than Mr. Chandler and I hope that subjective judgment does not color my comparison between the biographies.

The author depicts Mr. Chandler's life trajectory chronologically, in a conventional manner of a biography, from the writer's birth in 1888 in Chicago, childhood in Nebraska, then his youth in England (and Ireland), brief time spent in the British civil service as an Admiralty clerk, and equally brief stint on a newspaper job. Next, Mr. Chandler returns to the U.S., settles in California, marries Cissy, and lands a well paying job as an auditor in an oil company. Continual struggle with drinking and self-doubt plague him until his death in la Jolla in 1959.

Mr. Chandler's literary career is presented in detail, from his early "cloy and saccharine" poetry, through several years of writing crime stories for pulp magazines, to his novels, beginning with The Big Sleep, peaking with The Long Good-Bye and ending in an unremarkable Playback.

Mr. MacShane has selected the motif of Chandler's lack of sense of nationality as the main conceptual axis of the biography. Much of Chandler's worldview must have been affected by the shock resulting from his encounter with the loose concept of culture in California after having grown up in a rigid class structure of England.

The other leading motif in this biography is Mr. Chandler's struggle to escape the categorization as just a mystery writer. Chandler detested the basic premise of classic, deductive detective stories and was more interested in people than in the plots. I agree with the author that Chandler managed to escape the genre-writer niche only in his masterpiece: the Time reviewer observed that The Long Good-Bye

"crossed the boundary between good mystery and good novel"

Mr. MacShane contrasts the formulaic character of Hammett's Sam Spade, who "is not a person at all" with Chandler's Philip Marlowe, tough and clever yet human. Well, I tend to disagree: even in the outstanding Good-Bye Marlowe is at most half a person. It was finally Ross Macdonald who created a believable PI character in his Lew Archer.

I find it rather surprising that to me Chandler's novels feel so much more dated than Macdonald's even though their most productive years are less than 25 years apart (1939-1953 vs. 1949-1976).

And finally a personal connection: La Jolla, California, the place where Raymond Chandler spent the longest period of his life. I know all streets where he rented houses: my family and I used to live just a mile or two away, albeit some 25 years later.

Three and a quarter stars.

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The Long Drop by Denise Mina
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] all the hope he will ever feel is sucked out through his soles into the wet, treacherous earth..."

Denise Mina is one of my absolutely favorite writers and of the six books of hers that I have reviewed here on Goodreads, I have rated two with five stars (Garnethill, a masterpiece transcending the crime/mystery genre and The Dead Hour , a great crime novel) and three others with four stars. So I was really looking forward to reading Ms. Mina's newest work, The Long Drop (2017). Even if I do not think it is one of her better books the novel is definitely a very good read and I wholeheartedly recommend it. The fact that it is a standalone novel is an added bonus. I deeply appreciate Ms. Mina stopping each series that she had begun at three installments. It is more difficult for a writer (as Ms. Mina herself confirmed during her conversation with readers on Goodreads) but the tedious repetitive literary routine is thus avoided.

After 12 purely fiction crime/mystery novels, Ms. Mina sort of ventures into the field of the so-called "true crime". Despite the standard disclaimer about "fictitious characters and events" this is a fictionalization of the real-life story of a famous American-Scottish serial killer, Peter Manuel, convicted in 1958 for seven murders, and suspected of even more killings. I have read about twenty books in the true-crime genre, and this is the first one that I really like. I have been trying to understand why and the simplest explanation I have is that while most true-crime books attempt to show fictionalized events as true, Ms. Mina does the opposite: she writes about true events as fiction. And nothing conveys truth better than well-written fiction.

The novel intertwines events that happen in two time frames: the night of December 2/December 3, 1957, and the second half of May of 1958. The memorable December night begins when a famous and successful Glasgow lawyer accompanies his client, William Watt, whose family was murdered, to meet Peter Manuel. Manuel wants to sell information about the murders. We follow Watt and Manuel in their night-long voyage from one pub to another, we witness their drunkenness progress through a number of stages, and we read about the grim lives of various characters involved in the story. The other time frame presents scenes from Manuel's trial.

Ms. Mina presents a masterful picture of the working-class Glasgow of the late 1950s, the Glasgow of nightmares. She depicts the lives of men whose daily routine involves either extremely hard physical work or crime, daily heavy drinking in pubs, and the unifying pattern - vicious beatings they administer to their wives and children. In the meantime, the overlords of the economic crime, the masters of robberies, extortions, and protection racket, such as Dandy McKay, the real rulers of this working-class city, are beyond prosecution, untouchable by police as the crime lords, the police, and the city government live in perfect symbiosis. This is an extremely dark novel, made even darker by Ms. Mina cynical and thus deeply realistic portrayal of the basest human instincts.

At the beginning I had some difficulties connecting with the characters, but then I read the gut-wrenching passage about the father of one of the murdered girls:

"...his wife is waiting for him. She puts her arms around him and he sobs into her hair.
Mr. Cooke thinks about the weeping woman in the gallery. His unique desolation was all he had left of his Isabelle. Now the crying woman has taken that as well. He has been robbed again."

From that moment I could not put the book away: at times it shook my deeply and I appreciated the terrific prose.

I admire Ms. Mina for trying something different than repeating Alex Morrow stories. She is a great writer and even if not all her works are masterpieces they are all wonderful and worthwhile reads.

Three and a half stars.

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Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] I thought of Mr Visconti dancing with my aunt in the reception room of a brothel behind the Messagero after swindling the Vatican and the King of Saudi Arabia and leaving a wide trail of damage behind him in the banks of Italy. Was the secret of lasting youth known only to the criminal mind?"

I am quite ambivalent about Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt (1969): on the one hand novels that are funny in a demented way are one of my favorite genres. Alas, on the other hand, Mr. Greene's novel serves as a vehicle to tell a huge number of loosely connected stories, which - in turn - happens to be one of my least favorite genres. This balances out to a marginally positive recommendation based on various pearls of wisdom scattered throughout the text and some hilarious scenes.

The beginning sentence of the novel neatly sets up the plot:

"I met my Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother's funeral."

Immediately after the funeral, Aunt Augusta invites Henry, the narrator and a retired banking executive, for drinks. She tells him that he is not his mother's son, but rather a product of his father's affair. And so begins their friendship, of a sixty-something man with his seventy-something aunt. They could not be less alike. While Henry is a quintessential banking executive whose life is utterly organized, predictable, and boring, Aunt Augusta has a strong streak of anarchy in her, lives to travel, and knows some very, very, very strange people. She manages to infect Henry with her carefree attitude to life and they begin traveling together.

Their travels begin modestly, with a Brighton outing, but the range escalates to Paris, Boulogne, then on the Orient Express to Istanbul, and finally Argentina and Paraguay. The set of characters is even more impressive: first of all, there is Wordsworth, a Sierra Leone-born man, ostensibly Aunt Augusta's valet but in fact a man who attends to all her wants, and the mysterious and powerful persona of Mr. Visconti. My favorite character is Tooley, a very young woman whom Henry meets on the Orient Express. They smoke pot and she tells him about her life tribulations and about her father, a CIA operative.

The avalanche of colorful stories assaults the reader with the richness of tantalizing details: as an example, just on one page the author mentions marijuana and acid experiences, CIA, and the fear of castration. Future is being told from tea leaves, we learn about a porn movie theater in Havana, we are told about confession taken by a fake priest during World War II, and a suitcase stuffed with cash is toted across various borders. Tooley's father keeps a detailed record of his daily urinations and a character is arrested for using a wrong-colored handkerchief to blow his nose. We have a whirlwind of fast-changing locales in Europe, Asia, and South America, so the novel may even be viewed as a travelogue of sorts.

I have been totally exhausted and frankly bored by this maelstrom of stories, but it is quite likely that other readers will find the novel exhilarating. What redeems the book for me are the occasional tasty nuggets of literary brilliance and astute observations like

"Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food. Only the taste of poetry flags a little [...] Lovemaking too provides as a rule a more prolonged and varied pleasure after forty-five."

True! Alas, the express train of my life left the station called "Middle Age" many years ago.

Two and three quarter stars.

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